Webpage has bombed outside of Top 50 for search term in one week. What's the cause?

[mickburkesnr]

I've been monitoring the performance of some pages via the email Moz sends every week, and until this week two pages that I've managed to get ranking have ranked between 20 and 23 for the specific term. However, today on the email one of the pages for one search term has bombed out of the top 50 while the other page has remained unaffected.

What could be the cause for this? I've looked at Google Webmasters for an indication of a penalty of some sort but there is nothing glaringly obvious. I've no messages on there, and I haven't bought a load of spam links at all.

What else could I check?

[Ria_]

"two pages that I've managed to get ranking have ranked between 20 and 23 for the specific term. However, today on the email one of the pages for one search term has bombed out of the top 50 while the other page has remained unaffected."

Sometimes, if you have two pages that are ranking for the same search query it's not uncommon for Google to decide that only one of the pages needs to be presented to the user. If both are serving the same user intent then essentially Google may consider it (semantically) duplicate content, despite the fact that both pages may be worded differently, etc.

From my experience of having multiple pages ranking for the same keyword, the pages will keep battling it out in the SERPs bouncing up and down. One week, there'll be a cluster of 3 ranking terribly. The next week one will shoot up, while the other is nowhere to be seen. Personally I've found that Google seems to prefer it if there's only one page ranking for the term (it's an easier decision for Google to make and it won't get so confused which one to rank as more relevant to the query). By merging similar pages, I find that it ends up being stronger in Google as it's not having to compete in the SERPs with similar pages on your website.

I hope that helps at all, even if it's only from anecdotal evidence.

[rjonesx. 0]

Hi Mick,

The first thing to do is always verify the ranking change. Open up an incognito window in Chrome, search the term and see if it has dropped there as well. Google fluctuates quite a bit and sometimes ranking shifts are ephemeral and will return.

Second, we do find that there is far more fluctuation beyond page 1. Whether this is due to cruder metrics, lack of stabilization by engagement metrics, etc. is unknown, but what is certain is that greater fluctuation seems occur the deeper you get in the search results. I would not be highly concerned with this rankings loss at face value.

However, there are some things you can check.

• Have you lost any links pointing to this page recently
• Have you made any substantive changes to the site, such as internal link structure
• Have you introduced alternate content on your site that may now outrank this page

These are just a couple of the first steps you can look at.

Good luck!